A large pole with a light at the top of it that illuminates streets and paths

While designed to improve visibility for drivers and pedestrians, thus providing a safer environment, street lights are often used in fiction to illuminate threats to characters, especially in visual media such as most video games.

In some games street lights are destructible, often toppling over when hit, while others are nigh indestructible, serving as obstacles.

Trivia:

These are often called sodium lights in certain English dialects, although they may not technically be sodium lights.

There is an urban legend that some lights seem to switch on or off when people walk under them, but this has shown to be false by repeated experiments where the offending lights were filmed with and without people walking under them, and they simply switched on and off regularly. This is probably due to a failure in the timing mechanism in the given light. Still, the urban legend persists.

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